Simi Resident Finds Place in World Identifying Humanitarian Needs

Seeking out the world’s hungriest, most persecuted, least educated and sickest people isn’t a job that Gerald Clodfelter takes for granted.

While some might reconsider their choice of careers after seeing some of the planet’s most extreme examples of poverty and social injustice, the 52-year-old Simi Valley resident said it gives him a unique satisfaction and sense of place in the world.

Clodfelter, a development associate for the National Council of Churches of the United States, returned late this week from a two-week tour of Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The journey was undertaken to assess the humanitarian needs in those nations by a delegation from the council and the organization’s fund-raising arm, the Church World Service.

Clodfelter, a former fund-raising consultant for nonprofit groups, has been with the council for about a year. He got involved after hearing about the organization through his church, the United Methodist Church of Simi Valley.

“Each of the countries were so diverse and their problems so complex, and that was astounding for us,” Clodfelter said. “It was a fascinating trip that taught us a great deal about what the council needs to do to help these people.”

Created in the traumatic wake of World War II to help rebuild the tattered nations of Europe, the National Council of Churches now works in more than 70 countries, providing humanitarian and disaster relief and administering development programs to help countries become self-supporting.

*

The council, made up of more than 30 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox denominations, is funded by individual donors and philanthropic endowments.

Beginning Jan. 27, the eight-member delegation visited Haiti--a country that reels from economic turmoil, political instability and social upheaval.

The five-day tour took them from the fecund streets of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince to the lush mountain Highlands, where delegates met with regional leaders and members from the Haitian Spiritual Council--a national league of about 2,000 churches--to get a better idea of what the council could do to restore some normalcy to the lives of Haitians.

“It was a rugged trip and their needs were, to say the least, extreme,” Clodfelter said. “Clearly, there was a lot of work we could do there because these people have had such hard lives.”

In addition to education, health, development and a number of social programs, the council has organized an initiative called Hope at Home to reunite families torn apart by the brutal military regime that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991.

In the wake of the coup d’etat, bands of armed troops targeted villages, scattering residents and breaking up families in the process.

Some hid in remote forest villages while others crowded into small boats in hopes of reaching the United States.

“It’s a program that we are very proud of because it has done a lot to repair the damage done after the coup,” Clodfelter said.

After their tour of Haiti, the delegation traveled across the border to the Dominican Republic, which shares the mountainous island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

It was like entering another world.

Unlike Haiti, whose 6 million inhabitants are largely French- and Creole-speaking descendants of former slaves, the Dominican Republic still reflects the distinct character imposed on it by hundreds of years of Spanish colonialism.

*

The problems there, Clodfelter said, are not as acute as those in Haiti because the country is more prosperous, but there are a number of tragic social ills--such as child homelessness and prostitution--that continue to plague the country.

Clodfelter estimates as many as 60,000 children live on the streets in the Dominican Republic and as many 25,000 children work as prostitutes. About 9,000 of them are boys.

“It’s a very sad problem and is one of those issues that we consider extreme,” he said. “Our main goal right now is to get these children off the streets.”

To do so, the council has been working for some time to intervene in these children’s lives, teach them of their rights under the International Declaration of Human Rights and get them reunited with their families and back in school.

For Clodfelter and the rest of the group, the most anticipated part of the tour was their eight-day visit to Cuba, which came days after Pope John Paul II’s mission to the island nation.

“We were all very anxious to see what the effects of the Pope were,” he said. “And what we found surprised us.”

Since Cuban President Fidel Castro overthrew the pro-American and notoriously corrupt regime of President Fulgencio Batista in the early 1950s, Cuba has been an atheist state.

In the years immediately after the revolution, Castro’s regime closed or destroyed churches and seminaries, while forcefully discouraging residents from taking part in organized religion.

But the delegation members were surprised by what they found.

“We went in there with all sorts of ideas about what their lives were like,” Clodfelter said. “But, like most preconceived notions, they were all wrong.”

Castro had attempted to quash Cuban spirituality, but it survived and in some cases flourished in the back rooms and basements of ordinary Cubans.

*

Recognizing this, Castro decided in 1991 to label Cuba a secular rather than atheist state and to make a formal invitation to the pope to visit the country.

But despite the resilience of Cuban spirituality, the country is mired in problems.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba’s economic and social welfare system has spiraled downward.

Food is scarce, housing is in disrepair, there are few jobs and medical conditions are horrendous.

Clodfelter said he heard a story about a young boy who died of an easily remedied ailment because doctors did not have the right-sized syringe to provide medication.

He also heard stories of surgeries conducted without anesthesia and infants who die of malnutrition.

“Because Cuba is still a socialist state, everyone has access to health care, but there are no medical supplies to treat people,” he said. “That was perhaps the largest problem we found in Cuba and one that we are going to work on.”

Now that Clodfelter has returned with loads of information and observations on how the council and Church World Service can best help the countries he visited, the real work is just beginning.

Allotting money, acquiring the supplies and working out the logistics will take up most of his and others’ time for the next several months, as will trying to get more people involved in the mission.

“It’s important for people to be involved in what we’re trying to do,” he said. “That’s what keeps the whole operation going.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

FYI

For more information on how to help the Church World Service, call 1-800-297-1516, Ext. 144.